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THE FAR SOUTHEAST · HESSEN CASSEL ROAD / SOUTH ANTHONY'S SOUTHERN REACH
Hessen Cassel is the corridor at the city's far southeastern edge, where South Anthony Boulevard's commercial line runs out into the older settlement country along the Decatur Road diagonal. The name belongs to the German settlement geography of southern Allen County — the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Cemetery on old U.S. 27 south, in use since 1848, is also known as the Hessen Cassel Roman Catholic Cemetery — and the road's documented institutions are those of a farm-country crossroads absorbed into the city: Immanuel Baptist Church, organized in 1899 at Oliver and McKee, built its new building at Hessen Cassel Road and McKinnie Avenue in 1962; and the Allen County Public Library's Hessen Cassel Branch opened in October 1972 at 3030 East Paulding Road, on a two-acre tract the library board bought in 1970 at the junction of South Anthony Boulevard, Hessen Cassel Road and Paulding Road, expressly to serve the neighborhoods — Village Woods first among them — that had filled with workers' housing around the International Harvester plant in the decades before and after World War II.
The corridor's scale changed when Harvester closed in the 1980s (the plant's record is in the Business section), and its present population is among the city's most changed — the library's own facilities history notes the branch's particular popularity with the African American and Burmese communities now living around it. The Southeast Strategy Update names Hessen Cassel a secondary focus area that requires a corridor plan; as of this writing that plan has not been adopted, and the corridor's planning state is stated here exactly so. No origin for the Hessen Cassel name itself was found in the sources, and none is offered.
Sources: Allen County Public Library, Facilities Master Plan (April 7, 2022) — Hessen Cassel Branch history (land purchased 1970; opened October 1972; Harvester settlement; present communities); ACGSI, Wayne Township churches (Immanuel Baptist, Hessen Cassel Road, 1962); Allen County cemetery records via ACGSI (St. Joseph/Hessen Cassel Roman Catholic Cemetery, from 1848); City of Fort Wayne, Southeast Strategy Update (adopted January 2021), Hessen Cassel focus area.